Facilties & Capabilities

The group is assigned two laboratories with a total of over 2500 square feet of floor space. In addition the group uses a large wind tunnel facility with over 16,000 square feet of space. These laboratories are well-equipped with general purpose fluid mechanics measurement equipment such as pressure transducers, hot-wire anemometer capabilities (along with hot-wire manufacture/repair capabilities), several computers for data acquisition and analysis, data acquisition boards and software, thermocouples, digital cameras, smoke generators, oscilloscopes, digital filters, pulse generators, function generator, general purpose tools etc.

The College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has several joint facilities and persons that are available to assist the group. These facilities include a well-equipped machine shop, manufacturing laboratories, several additive manufacturing machines, laser machining, machinists, and an electronics engineer. In addition the Department of Aerospace Engineering has a dedicated laboratory engineer to aid the group's laboratory.

https://news.erau.edu/headlines/wind-tunnel-insights-help-make-ship-deck-landings-safer

Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) equipment

The group has available one snap-shot (non-time-resolved) PIV system and one high-speed PIV system. Each PIV system has four cameras or more for multi-scale flow field measurement. The snap-shot system comprises four 29-megapixel (MP) cameras which can be used in various configurations. The high-speed PIV system comprises six high-speed cameras and two high repetition rate Nd:YLF dual head lasers. Both commercial and in house timing units are also available.

The peripheral PIV equipment available includes a variety of micro camera lenses with focal length ranging from wide angle to telephoto, camera lens filters to reduce ambient light scattering, Scheimpflug adapters to improve focusing and sets of spherical and cylindrical laser lenses to generate the laser light sheet. The tracers in the carrier flow are generated by an oil-based smoke generator, with a consistent particle size of 0.2-0.3 microns. An additional 6-jet atomizer to generate tracer particles with slightly larger diameter is also available as needed. The groups has available both in house scripts and commercial software (DaVis 10) for PIV/PTV processing including stereoscopic PIV. Several computers with multi-core, multi-thread capability for parallel dedicated PIV/PTV processing are also available.

Hot-wire capabilities

The groups uses hot-wire anemometry for velocity measurements. Several single and cross wires prongs (2.5 & 5 microns) are available for use with in house probe manufacture and repair capabilities. The HWA system capabilities include over twenty measurement channels with associated high-speed data acquisition systems. Several high accuracy traverse systems with position encoders are available to be used for automatic HWA scanning.

https://daytonabeach.erau.edu/-/media/images/daytona-beach/labs/wind-tunnel-facility.jpg?as=0&hash=D113B0A9DD3DD4BF69A8DF08435D980D57EE91F3

Large subsonic wind tunnel

This is a $10M state-of-the-art, low-speed tunnel housed in a dedicated 14,000-square-foot building. The has a 4-by-6 foot test section and with maximum flow speed of up to 420 ft/s (120 m/s). The test section is 12-foot long, and equipped with a research grade six-component force balance along with an associated model positioning system.

More information on this wind tunnel can be found here.

Boundary layer wind tunnel

The Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel (BLWT) in the PI's laboratory is an open-return, low-speed tunnel with a 0.64 x 0.4 m (nominal) cross section and a turbulent boundary layer develops over a length of about 4.5 m. Free stream flow speeds of greater than 20 m/s (friction Reynolds numbers > 2500) can be achieved. The top wall of the tunnel is adjustable to allow for various pressure gradients. A floating element balance is under design/construction.

Google Sites

Report abuse